So here’s what you need to know about Loremaster, if you decide to do it:

Um. There’s like, lots of quests. And stuff.

And it’s probably going to take you a long time. >.>

According to this post, I was done with Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor and Cataclysm Loremaster on the 10th of March.

Kia’s Brain: “Oh, I think I can finish it in a couple of weeks!” You procrastinating moron.

To be honest, I theoretically could have finished it in a couple of weeks. However. Maintaining that kind of commitment to questing in a pixelated world is hard.

That’s not to say it can’t be done! Looky, I did it!

So here’s some encouragement for those of you who are attempting (or considering attempting) finishing Loremaster before MoP drops (I know Lizzyuh is!):

YOU CAN DO IT!!!

Here’s a couple pieces of hard-won advice I can pass on to my fellow questors:

1) Get a quest helper. I used Everyquest. It comes with a handy extra thing called Questgivers, which puts exclamation points on your map where the quest givers are. If you mouse over them, it will pop up a list of quests that the NPC has – white ones for available quests, blue ones for completed quests. It’s incredibly handy, especially if you were one of those people who didn’t finish zones when questing and now are stuck in the middle of quest chains. One caveat: I had no end of errors when I would zone into dungeons or raids. I’d get some kind of weird error message every two seconds. I eventually got to the point where I had it disabled EXCEPT for when I needed it for questing.

2) Take it in small bites. Pick the continent that you have the most completed and start there. When I leveled Kia, I leveled her only through questing – specifically, only questing in Kalimdor. So when I started Loremaster, it made sense to start there, because at that point, I only had about 7 or 8 zones left on the continent.

3) Set reasonable expectations. You might think that doing one zone a night is a reasonable goal, and it can be… when you’re doing EK and the zones are generally in the 35-40 quests/zone area. But don’t be surprised to find that you can’t maintain that pace for long. Even when you can blink at stuff and make it fall over, it is still going to take you awhile to finish a zone. I think the quickest I managed a zone was about an hour and a half. The longest one was Icecrown. That one took me something like six to eight hours. No, I didn’t do it all in one sitting.

4) Celebrate your steps. It is TOTALLY OKAY to give a mighty cheer when you finish a zone achievement! I did! Scared the cats a couple of times! (That isn’t hard to do, but the point remains.) And getting one of the five continent achievements absolutely deserves the imbibing of an adult beverage. Provided you are, of course, of legal drinking age and are not planning on driving. The Sisterhood of Kia does not in any way endorse illegal practices, so behave yourselves.

5) It isn’t a race, so don’t try to win it. Seriously, some of these quest lines are epic – great stories, funny stories, compelling stories. Enjoy the ride. You will definitely have times when you are going to just want to grind through stuff. I did. Some of the zones are eye-blurringly boring.

Kia’s Brain: OMG CAN WE SAY BLADE’S EDGE MOUNTAINS LOUD ENOUGH???

When you find a quest line that you find yourself enjoying, soak it up. For me, I had never quested in Netherstorm before, and found myself really loving the quest line where you have to figure out what’s going on in the town full of ghosts. I usually hate escort quests, but when it came to saving Bessy, I had a ball. Totally moo’ed at my laptop.

Kia’s Brain: You did no such thing. I was there.

Kia: You are such a buzzkill.

6) Expect burnout. At some point, you are going to be sick of questing questing questing. It’s okay. Stop questing. Do something else. I got on a reputations kick (am still on a reputations kick… 37 and counting). Play Diablo 3. Learn Japanese. Take the dog to the park. Whatever. I’m guessing Mists is going to come out in early August, so you still have MONTHS. Come back to it when you want to.

Even with all its drawbacks, Loremaster is still a pretty cool thing to go after, whether you’re in it for the gold, the nerdpoints, or the actual lore. Here’s some more hard-earned tips:

– When possible, try to start with the lowest-level zone and work up. There are almost always breadcrumbs that take you to the next zone which can be easily missed if you don’t. Quest lines tend to make more sense that way, anyway.

– Invest in a mammoth if you don’t have one already, especially if you are planning on doing any significant amount of looting, which you should, as it all counts towards Got My Mind On My Money. Being able to get rid of junk at a moment’s notice is a great relief.

– Quests count for the area that they are labelled under. If the quest is filed under a label that is the name of a dungeon or raid, it doesn’t count for a zone. Sorry! Also, dailies sometimes (but not always) count for zones the first time you do it, but never after that.

– Outland is, by far, the worst of the lot. It was put in before the achievement system but not retrofitted like vanilla content was. It’s hard to get to, unless you have your hearth set to Shattrath. Even then, the flights are incredibly long. The zone achievements often require you to do almost every quest in the zone, and some of them are wicked hard to find. For example, you cannot complete Nagrand until you have unlocked the rest of the chain, which is in Shadowmoon Valley, so don’t make yourself crazy trying. It also has Blade’s Edge Mountains and Hellfire Peninsula, which together almost totally blot out the joy that is Nagrand and Zangermarsh. Just sayin >.>

3 Responses to In Which Kia Does ALL THE QUESTS

Congrats! I don’t know if it has gotten any easier this expac to complete, but it was definitely a time sink when I did it. I wish that Blizzard had given credit for EK and Kalimdor zones to people that already had Loremaster previously. It just seems strange to go back and complete individual zones when you already have credit for the whole world.

I didn’t attempt it before Cata, so I don’t know either, but my guildies who did it previously have said it was worse with all the quest hunting. It does seem strange to not give the zone achievements, though.